Kotawân is the Cree word for campfire. We picked it on purpose. A campfire is where people sit down together after a day on the land, talk about what they saw, and pass along what they know. We wanted this portal to work the same way.

Kotawân is the online home of the Oil Sands Monitoring Muskrat Health Program, which works with communities across Treaty 8 and Treaty 6 territory. The program has a simple question at its centre: what is happening to muskrats, and what does that tell us about the water and land they depend on?

Muskrats spend their lives in marshes, creeks and rivers, eating the plants that grow there. Whatever is in that water tends to show up in them. They are also a traditional food, so their health matters to the families who harvest them. When trappers bring in animals and samples are collected, those samples go to Environment and Climate Change Canada for analysis. The results then come back here, where the people who contributed to them can see them.

That last part is important to us. Too often, communities hand over samples and never hear what came of them. Kotawân was built so the information flows back.

On the portal you’ll find:

• Results and data from the muskrat health program
• Stories and articles from the people doing the work
• A new learning platform, starting with a course on muskrat necropsy

This is a first version, and it will grow. More courses, more data and more voices are on the way. If something is missing, or you think we got something wrong, we’d like to hear about it.

Pull up a seat.